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Tuesday, November 24, 2015

This article, since updated, was originally published in the April-May
1996 issue of TAC Times.By Chris Celichowski

Thirty autumns
ago, Monday, November 25, 1985, a slate grey sky hung over Dretzka Park in
Milwaukee. As it had many cold November days before, nearby Lake Michigan
pumped icy, moist air through skin into bone. For Minnesotan Bonnie Sons, the
weather foreshadowed a tragedy whose memory three decades later still casts a
melancholy pall over her heart.

Seven cross
country runners from Iowa State University had just conquered the elements,
their opponents, and their own limitations to earn second place at the 1985 NCAA
Division I National Cross Country Championships. But runners Sheryl Maas, Julie
Rose and Sue Baxter, coaches Ron Renko and Pat Moynihan, and student trainer
Stephanie Streit could not outrun Fate. Hours after living out their dreams,
they died before creating new visions, victims of a tragic plane crash.

For Bonnie Sons
and the remaining members of the Cyclone women’s cross country team, 30 years
have scarcely dulled the sharp pain of that day. Sons, the 1983 Class A
two-mile champion from Central High in Norwood, was a junior at Iowa State and
the Cyclones’ top finisher at the national meet. She now lives in Shorewood,
Minnesota, and runs for Team Run ‘N Fun in local and regional road races. Three
decades later, details of the race have become a blur, yet the crash remains a
vivid specter.

"When I
eulogized Ron [Renko] at the ISU memorial service, I called it ‘A day of
triumph and tragedy.’ I guess that’s the way I’ll always remember it,"
Sons said.

Ron Renko

The second-place
finish at the Division I meet capped a tremendous year for Sons and her ISU
teammates. With "Ain’t Nothing Gonna Break My Stride" as the team
anthem, the Cyclone lady harriers won ISU’s fourth Big Eight CC Championship in
Renko’s seven seasons. They captured their fourth consecutive NCAA Region V
title. Although Renko coached ISU to an AIAW national title in 1981, the team’s
finish in the ‘85 NCAA meet marked the school’s best finish in that meet. He
did it with only one all-American finisher (Sons) and a pack of strong,
determined young women, including: Tami Prescott (Colby), Charlene Elyea
(Lentzring), Julie Rose, Sue Baxter, Cheryl Maas, and Jill Winter (Slettedahl).

After the meet,
Sons and her excited teammates returned to the hotel, dressed, packed and left
immediately for the airport.

"Normally, we
would eat after we showered, then return to Ames. But that day, Ron decided we
would have a dinner celebration when we got back to Ames," Sons recalled.
"We never got to celebrate."

Iowa State owned
three seven-seat Rockwell AeroCommanders, operated by university pilots. The
Cyclone basketball team needed the planes the same day. The men’s cross country
team got on one plane, and a few remaining members of the men’s team got on the
second plane. Sons boarded the third
plane with Maas, Rose, Baxter, Renko, Moynihan, Streit and pilot Burt Watkins.
Elyea and Winter drove home to Iowa and Minnesota, respectively, with their
parents. After Sons placed her bag on the third plane and took her seat, the
pilot of the second plane, Bill Brock, asked Sons, who earned her license during
her first two years of college, if she wanted to ride in the co-pilot’s seat of
the second plane. She accepted the invitation and took her bag to the second
plane. Brock, needing to fill his plane, also asked Tami Prescott to join them.
She left her bag on the third plane. Brock’s
invitations saved, and forever changed, Sons’ and Prescott’s lives.

When the three
planes left Mitchell Field in Milwaukee, the pilots knew a wall of bad weather
stood between them and Ames. As they cruised above the clouds in pristine
stillness, weather forecasters from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
told them the wall contained a mixture of sleet, ice and snow. They advised the
ISU planes to divert from landing at the small municipal airport in Ames and
land in Des Moines, a larger airport equipped with an Instrument Landing System
which would aid the pilots’ landing in bad weather.

As they approached
the Des Moines airport, the three planes were in frequent contact with the
tower and each other. The first plane landed. Sons’ plane, the second one,
began its approach. The third plane followed them about 10 or 15 minutes
behind.

"I’ve never
been so terrified in my life," Sons recalls. Outside, the mixture of
precipitation made visibility nearly impossible and the sky’s ceiling was too
close to the ground. "I was gripping the front dash of the plane. Bill
asked me to look out the front window and guide him. When I finally saw the
landing lights, I told him we were already over the runway and not too far off
the ground. We landed long on the runway, but safely. When we got out of the
plane, the ground was like a skating rink."

They went to a
nearby fixed base operator (FBO), joined the occupants of the first plane, and
waited for the third plane. Ten minutes passed, then 15. As they waited, they
could not hear the exchange between Burton Watkins, the pilot of the third
plane, and the Des Moines tower:

After 25 minutes,
a nervous pilot Bill Brock called the tower to check on the status of the third
plane. When he returned to the FBO, the waiting runners and coaches saw Brock’s
ashen face and learned the third plane went down. It had crashed in a sparsely
wooded residential area, slamming into a homeowner’s front lawn on Country Club
Boulevard, less than three miles from the airport. Maas, Rose, Baxter, Renko,
Moynihan, Streit and pilot Watkins died immediately. So did a part of each remaining
member of the Cyclone women’s cross country team.

The crash occurred
while Sons’ parents, Tom and Geraldine, drove from Milwaukee to their farm in
rural Norwood, Minnesota. They stopped for dinner and Tom Sons called his son,
Greg, to check on the farm. Fortunately, Bonnie called Greg soon after she
found out about the crash. He told his parents about the crash and told them
Bonnie was okay. When they got in the car after supper, they turned on WCCO.
Details of the crash led the news.

"I still
don’t know what made me get off that plane..." Sons said softly. "It
scares me to this day--’Why did I get off that plane?’" After a moment
lost in thought, her suddenly empty expression disappeared and she continued.
"It’s made me realize you better enjoy each day you have, because you don’t
know when..." Words failed, but her emotion completed the sentence.

For Sons, losing Renko
and her teammates marked the end of a chapter in her running career and her
life. "We [Sons and her surviving teammates] tried to put it behind us,
but it was very hard," she said. "For certain, the crash affected our
track season the following spring." Even today, she finds it hard to talk
about the experience.

"There was
and will always be a void there. It was like losing my family. At school they
were my family. When I got to Ames I knew nobody. Then all of a sudden we lost
two coaches and three teammates." The mother of four knows the loss
experienced by the parents of the three runners and two coaches was worse than
the loss she and her teammates experienced. She reflected, "To have them
snatched in the prime of their lives must have been very hard to take."

Sons remembers
Anoka native Renko as an outgoing, intelligent and intense coach who knew how
to motivate his charges. "Ron could convince you that you could do
anything. He convinced me, this skinny, little farm girl from Norwood,
Minnesota, that I could run with the best--that I could be one of them."

When Dickens wrote
the immortal beginning lines of "A Tale of Two Cities," "It was
the best of times, it was the worst of times," he could have been writing
about November 25, 1985. It was a day of triumph and tragedy. A day when Fate
stilled seven Cyclones.